With Manchester finally thawing out after the cold snap, a few of us met up in St Peter's Square.

Sophie and Peter had already arranged a donation for Don't Walk Past for the Friday evening (11th Jan) outreach to give out sleeping bags and warm clothing for local homeless in the cold weather. Ben managed to provide some hats and gloves nearby this week. We will likely arrange more collections through the year!

On top of the donations, we had more local GoodGymers complete their document check for their DBS, so they are able to carry out nearby missions that get triaged towards GoodGym as a group that can help. It would be great to have more people mission verified to help out with this!

There were also some trainers to be recycled so a JogOn package was prepared to send for refurbishment and reuse, or for shredding and recycling of materials. A great way to help the circular economy of sportswear!

Peter and I completed a loop of the city centre for a nice evening jog.

Great to meet Stefanie and Sophie this evening!

Keep MCR tidy provide a great resource for refuse sacks (and in future we'll tap into their litter pickers and bag rings too) and promote local community litter picking in Manchester. We got a hold of 20-30 pink refuse sacks and between the four of us, collected at least 10 bags (plus a bit more) full sacks of discarded waste!

We covered 6 km, starting by Piccadilly gardens before going along Canal St, to Deansgate and then to the Castelfield bowl before downing tools to run the remaining 1-2 km back to the meeting point.

We collected a whole range of items, including lots of cans/fast food packaging, laughing gas canisters, discarded vapes and cigarette butts, drinks cartons, and lots and lots of polystyrene bits.

We bumped into Don't Walk Past Manchester on their Monday night round and had a chat, possibly due a donation push toward the colder winter months. Keep an eye out for future tasks!

p.s. We did spot a lit Christmas tree in Deansgate. It's coming.

7 Westminster GoodGymers ran 5.5k from to St Andrew’s Youth Club to get it ready for 2020!

New Start Location Next Week!!!!! We will be running out of Marshal Street Leisure Centre only about 300 metres from the New Balance Store, just off Carnaby Street. I will be waiting outside to meet you!!

Running South running past the posh shops and through St James park working out what the bronze domes were for!

We made it 2.5k to St Andrews Youth Club, with a VIP visit the club was even busier than normal and the huge range of activities for Westminsters young people again blows my mind every time!! Our bellies started to rumble as the smell of the cookery club making Chinese New Year celebratory food drifted over.

Prepared for the craziest garage in London we entered the main store room in the club and after a month gap it was in big time need of some TLC!! Looking like my bedroom back in 95 there was hardly a piece of floor without something random placed not neatly on it. So we emptied the garage and put the jigsaw back together! Creating a walkway and order not seen in the garage this year!! Allowing for things no matter how random to be found and the youth club to function seamlessly as usual!

With the garage looking great it was time to head back to scout out our new Start location!! Working out (getting wrong) the routes to Marshal street hopefully it will be smooth sailing next week!!

5.5k complete we said goodbye to New Balance which has been our home for the last 3 years!

See you next week

Joel

9 GoodGym Westminster runners ran 7k to Little Venice to pick up 8 buckets full of recycling along the canal to celebrate GoodGym’s 10th Birthday!! #GG10

A lovely evening in London Town for our Wednesday adventures as we glided down 3.5k on Little Venice with a couple of stops to fly the GG flag along the way.

Big shout out to Elena for her first GG run and a massive congratulations to Tom for reaching to Magical 50 GoodDeed milestone.

Arriving at the Canal and River Trust HQ where we grabbed our kit and headed out to rid the canal of as much recycling as possible for the evening! We limited the rubbish collection as the bins were way over flowing and really focused our efforts on recyclables as there was a handy line of recycling bins we could use.

Working our way West we found plenty of plastics, bottles and cans and even managed to do a on the grab sort of the recycling.

Great to be on the canal path as the sun set on a lovely September day doing our bit to help this beautiful stretch of water looking at its best!

35 minutes of grabbing, sorting and recycling away had us ready for the off. With the hands sanitised and kit put away we runoff as the darkness fell.

Getting back to base with a good workout complete and a top task in the bag we stretched out and head off into the night!

Thanks for coming along and hope to see you next week for our visit to St Andrews youth Club!!

Joel